Spectator Books of the Year: The real impact of guns on America

I’ve chosen two very different stories of young American lives. In Another Day in the Death of America (Guardian/Faber, £16.99), the journalist Gary Younge anatomises American society and its squandered potential by means of a simple conceit: he chose a random date in 2013 and investigated the lives of those children and teenagers shot and killed on that day. It’s a profoundly important piece of reportage, seemingly written with restraint but devastatingly powerful.

Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock’s debut, The Smell of Other People’s Houses (Faber, £7.99), is a gorgeous young adult novel, interweaving the lives of four teenagers in small-town Alaska in the 1970s — their community, their struggles and joys. Younge and Hitchcock probably have little overlap in their readerships, but their books, besides being two of the best I’ve read this year, are also exceptionally good at taking characters one would expect to be incomprehensibly distant and bringing them close — making us feel an intimate part of their lives and they of ours.